2016: A Year in Pictures

Well, I think we can all agree that this year hasn't been one of the best. We've lost Prince, David Bowie, Terry Wogan, and Carrie Fisher, among others, and politically, it's been one of my least favourite years yet.

Despite that, I've kept busy with plenty of projects this year. The arts are so important in upholding values of decency and inclusion, and I'm glad to have had the opportunity to work on projects that uphold those values this year.
Here's my review of the year in pictures.

Riot! My Chariot of Fire publication

Riot! My Chariot of Fire publication

This summer, an artwork called The Aftermath Dislocation Principle by Jimmy Cauty, came to Leeds. Housed in a shipping container, it's a scale model artwork of a small British village in the wake of some mysterious civil unrest.

To accompany the visit of this artwork to Leeds, I put together a publication of some local writers and artists responding to the theme 'Riot'. We had some great writing and poetry in there from writers like Ian Harker, Gloria Dawson, Jennifer Isherwood, Boff Whalley and Lisa Bristow, among others. Copies were available free from The Chemic pub in Leeds, where the ADP was situated.

Gloria Dawson reads from the Riot! My Chariot of Fire Publication

Here's my friend Rachael Rix-Moore invigilating the ADP exhibition.

There were plenty of other performances going on during the ADP's visit to Leeds, including a performance by the Commoner's Choir, readings, and noise workshops. It was a joyful and celebratory few weeks, and I was glad to have had the opportunity to be involved.

Teaching for First Story 

One of the things I was really excited about doing this year was teaching for First Story. They are a literature charity who place writers in residency in schools in the UK.

First Story anthologies

This year I started a Residency in Leeds White Rose Academies Trust, which will result in an anthology just like one of the ones pictured above.

It has been such a huge privilege and joy to work with the young people at the school. They constantly surprise me with their bravery and inventiveness. One of my students even got shortlisted in the First Story National Six-Word Story Competition!

Remembering Oluwale: an Anthology 

Writer Catherine Vallely at the Remembering Oluwale Book Launch. Photo by Raj Passy

Towards the end of 2015, Max Farrar of the Remember Oluwale charity got in touch to ask whether I'd be interested in helping them put an anthology together in memory of David Oluwale.

Oluwale was a man who came to the North of England from Nigeria in the late 50s; he spent a great deal of his time in Leeds sleeping rough, where he was repeatedly victimised by two police officers, who assaulted and taunted him. He was later found floating dead in the River Aire. (You can read more about his story in Foreigners by Caryl Phillips, or The Hounding of David Oluwale by Kester Aspden.)

The Remember Oluwale Charity works to keep his memory alive, and to campaign to make the city of Leeds one which is more inclusive and welcoming. It's a great charity.

A writing competition resulted in an anthology, which was launched as part of the Northern Short Story Festival. The book is out now and available from Valley Press books.

Poet Cherie Taylor-Battiste at the launch of the Remembering Oluwale anthology. Photo by Raj Passy

Writer David Cundall at the Remembering Oluwale book launch

Remembering Oluwale: an Anthology, available now from Valley Press

The Northern Short Story Festival

2016 saw the launch of the first ever Northern Short Story Festival: a day of talking, reading, discussing, and workshopping, short stories.

We were lucky to have some amazing writers taking part in this year's festival. Avril Joy, Clare Fisher, Anna Chilvers, and many more, all took part.

Carys Bray talks to Richard Smyth at the Northern Short Story Festival 2016

The Northern Short Story Festival 2016 was a huge success - we saw all of the workshops sell out, and lots of positive comments on social media afterwards. Plenty took us up on our offer to talk small publishing with editors from Comma Press, Valley Press, and Tartarus Press; this kind of event is quite rare in the North of England, and it was clear that people wanted the opportunity to talk about short stories, and to find out more about the publishing world.




It was an exciting day, and afterwards we were all glad to get to the afterparty to have a drink to wind down. Boo Owl (from the Big Bookend) got a bit excited and rowdy. Here he is, having a go on a ukulele that doesn't belong to him.

Boo Owl plays the ukulele

I'm pleased to say that, after winning a grant from Leeds Inspired for next years' festival, there will be a Northern Short Story Festival in 2017 too - so watch this space for more news!

Fictions of Every Kind, and Writing on Air 

Fictions of Every Kind at Writing on Air. L-R: SJ Bradley, Claire Stephenson, Jenna Isherwood

One of the really fun things I got to get involved with this year was the Chapel FM Writing on Air festival. Every year, the folk at Chapel FM invite writers and writing groups into their (frankly amazing) space, to come and broadcast a festival of live spoken word events.

Organising our programme is something I can't take credit for - Jenna Isherwood (pictured above, on the right) did most of the hard work. It was great to be involved and we're planning to take part again in 2017.

Jenna was also responsible for buying gifts for any brave participants who took part in the open mic at Fictions of Every Kind this year. It was she who was responsible for buying these majestic mug cakes, which were one of the highlights of my year:

Fictions of Every Kind Mug Cakes

Now I look back on it all - whew, it seems to have been quite a jam-packed year! I was glad to have the mug cakes on hand to keep me going.

Other things that were good this year were: I found a shop near me that sells old Ladybird books.

I saw this cool little boat and harbour while in Northern Ireland over Christmas:

Two of my own short stories were published this year: The Gordon Trask, on Disclaimer Magazine, and Maps of Imaginary Towns, on Litro.

I'm also looking forward to working on some more exciting projects next year. Here are some (just some!) of the things I'll be up to in 2017:

February to July - teaching a Comma Press Short Story Writing Course at Carriageworks Theatre in Leeds. There's some more information about the course itself here, and you can book your place online here.


February 27th - hosting Fictions of Every Kind: Treats, with short story writer Lara Williams and poet Suzannah Evans. If you're lucky, there will be more mug cakes. More information here.

March 2017 - taking part in the Chapel FM Writing on Air Festival.

3rd June 2017 - the second Northern Short Story Festival; programme and ticket information to be announced.


Late June 2017 - the release of my second novel, Guest, from Dead Ink Books. Details, launch events and readings to be announced. Watch this space for more information!

Happy new year, everyone!


Currently Reading


Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow - Peter Hoeg
Radio Sunrise - Anietie Isong

Organising the Remember Oluwale Writing Prize

It feels like such a short time ago that Max Farrar of Remember Oluwale first contacted me on LinkedIn, to ask whether I'd be interested in helping organise a writing contest, and anthology, in memory of David Oluwale. That was last November. Now we're in April and about to publish our shortlist, and I can't believe how fast the time has flown.

The Remember Oluwale Anthology was a joint venture between myself, my organisation Fictions of Every Kind, Remember Oluwale, and The Big Bookend Festival. We're very happy that Valley Press agreed to publish the resulting anthology quite early on in the process - before we'd even started taking entries.

I've done a lot of work organising the writing prize, and editing the anthology (with help along the way from lots of people - we'll come to that in a minute), and wanted to do a blog explaining the process we used to run the competition.

Once Fiona Gell (of the Big Bookend), myself, and Max Farrar had all agreed that we wanted to run a writing contest, things got moving pretty quickly. Valley Press got onboard early on, and said they would be happy to publish the book - in which we were planning to publish the longlisted contest entries, as well as previously published works by writers like Linton Kwesi Johnson, Ian Duhig, and Kester Aspden. Max did an excellent job of recruiting an amazing panel of judges, which included Marina Lewycka (of 'A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian' fame), poet Ian Duhig, and Caryl Phillips (who has written extensively about David Oluwale's life and death.)

This was great news and gave us momentum to get the writing prize running.

As the charity's work is to raise awareness of 'David's issues' in cities - marginalisation, immigration, mental health, and homelessness - we were all agreed that we would invite poets and writers to submit stories and poems that reflected on these issues. We did this because we all felt that 'David's issues' were a wide and current issue, and we knew that writers would have a lot of interesting things to say about them. We agreed our themes and contest rules, and Fiona got the contest page up on the Big Bookend website.

I took advice from a colleague more experienced in running writing contests, and set a submission window 3 months long. This way, he told us (thanks Wes!) we'd be sure to get as many entries as we needed.

We took entries from 20th December - March 6th, and recruited an excellent team of filter readers - 5 people in total - all of whom are practising writers themselves, who either read for existing literature magazines, or are literature professors, or who have a Masters in writing or cultural practise, or a combination of all of the above. We were lucky to find such a great reading team, and all of them get a thanks in the book.

We took all of our entries through Submittable. This was for two reasons: one, because it cuts down hugely on admin (very important, when you're running a writing contest in your spare time) and two, because it allows for "blind-reading."

"What is blind reading?" I hear you cry? Well, it's a system whereby the filter readers don't get to see the author's name. It's a much fairer way to read submissions, because it doesn't allow the readers' prejudices - whatever they may be, we all have them - to impact on their reading of the work. So, each reader had a selection of 15-20 pieces each, which they read without knowing anything about the person who wrote it. Not their gender, or their background - nothing. This seemed important, as it means the readers had to choose (or not choose) work, based solely on what they saw in front of them.

Submittable does charge a fee - not huge, but it was one we thought worth paying, given that it allowed us to read the entries 'without prejudice', if you like. It also made running the contest much easier. Our contest entry fee was only £3, which is a total bargain when you compare it with some of the larger writing competitions.

We had 70 entries in all. The readers did a great job of reading these thoughtfully, then choosing a few from their pile to go forward into the anthology. If the readers weren't sure about an entry - and this might have been because they didn't know whether it was relevant enough to 'David's issues', or because they were on the fence about whether or not they quite fit in the anthology - they let me know, and these pieces went for a second reading, by somebody else in the team.

This process produced a longlist of 26 writers, all of which will be published in the anthology.

One thing that we did in this contest, which is quite rare, was that I kept up a high level of communication with the entrants. I sent 'decline' responses to those writers whose pieces we hadn't selected for the longlist, and 'acceptance' responses to those whose we had. Most writing contests don't bother to do this - they just let declined writers find out, by default, when the longlist or shortlist is publicly published. Having been on the other side of the fence so many times, as a writing contest entrant, and knowing how it feels to find out that you haven't been shortlisted by reading a list on the web.... well, I didn't want to treat entrants to our contest that way. Luckily, our submissions portal made it very easy to remain in contact with entrants, otherwise I would not have been able to do this.

At this stage of the process, everything started happening all at once. We were on a fairly tight deadline to get everything in to Valley Press on time, so there were lots of things to do.

Max Farrar and Sai Murray started sourcing previously published works to go into the anthology, and they also worked on whittling the longlist down to a shortlist of 10. This shortlist was to go on to be read by the judges, who will select and award the four top prizes. (More on the shortlisting process, later.)

Whilst all this was going on, I was receiving the previously published works, and collating the longlisted contest entries to go into the anthology. I was doing loads of different things all at once at this point: going through a light editorial process with some of the writers (where I had spotted errors or omissions in their pieces), getting writers' bios (for the contributors' notes section in the end of the book), looking for and correcting typos; getting Max's introduction for the book, writing my own introduction for the book, putting it all together into a single document; making sure the same font was used throughout, checking and double-checking for errors and typos, making sure the formatting made sense.... basically, all the things that you don't notice when you're reading a book when they're right, but the first thing you notice when they're wrong.

I spent about three weeks constantly glued to my computer. I got backache and my eyes started to go funny. I legit thought I was going mad at a couple of points. (It was all ok in the end, though.)

At the end of March, breathing a huge sigh of relief, I sent everything off to Rosa, our lovely editor & publisher at Valley Press. She was very complimentary, and also very pleased that we'd got everything in on time to meet our projected publication date, of 3rd June.

A thing nobody often tells you about publishing: lead times are long. It's not as if you send a manuscript into a publisher, and they print it out, and hey presto! next week, you're holding a book in your hands. Things take much longer than that. Publishers need time to typeset your work, to proofread, and to design the cover. In our case, Sai Murray (or Remember Oluwale) will be designing the cover. If you ever work with a publisher that doesn't spend time doing these things, you're going to end up with a very shonky-looking book indeed. Ours will be at least 2 months from me sending everything to Rosa, to the book actually coming out - and that is an unusually short timeframe, for publishing.

I promised you more about shortlisting. Choosing the best pieces for the shortlist was not an easy task at all, never is. By the time we were down to a longlist of 26, we had a lot of very good pieces to choose from. All of us in the organizing party - me, Max, Sai, and Fiona - all had our favourites. And they did not coincide at all. Literature: it's so subjective. I produced one 'wishlist' for the shortlist, of 9 pieces; Fiona did the same, and so did Max. They were all completely different. (Apart from 1 or 2 pieces that appeared on all three lists.)

So, Max and Sai developed a system, using points awarded for various things like: how relevant the piece was to David's issues; how well-written it was; how creatively it approached its subject. How can you award points for creativity, I hear you cry?! Well, the answer is, none of us is completely sure. Like I said, it was tough.

There were lots of pieces that nearly made it into the shortlist, then at the last minute, didn't. There were pieces we all argued over and pieces we defended to the death. There were lots of things that we all liked a lot (including a couple of my personal favourites - not that I'm bitter) that didn't make it onto the shortlist. That is shortlisting for you, I'm afraid.

In the end though, Max and Sai discussed it and produced a list of 10 pieces that we could all agree on, and which will soon go forward to the judges for their deliberation.

It has been a great privilege to be involved with this project, and I have learned so much during the course of it. Not just about editing and running a contest, but also about David's story, and about how important stories and poems can be in bringing his story back into our consciousness.

My huge thanks go to Fiona Gell for all of her help & support, for my co-organisers at Fictions of Every Kind for the same, and for Max Farrar for having suggested it in the first place.

Currently reading

The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch Philip K. Dick
Sweet Home Carys Bray  

The Remember Oluwale Writing Prize

(Image from David Oluwale Memorial Association webpage)

I'm currently helping to organize the Remember Oluwale Writing Prize, a collaboration between Fictions of Every Kind, Remember Oluwale, and the Big Bookend Festival. Shortlisted entries will be published in an anthology published by Valley Press, and four winning entries will win cash prizes. We are really pleased to have an amazing judging panel of Caryl Phillips, Marina Lewycka, and Ian Duhig.

David Oluwale came to the UK from Nigeria in the 60s, in search of work and a better life. During his years living in Leeds he faced a range of issues like mental ill health, victimisation by members of the police, homelessness, and worklessness. His life and shocking death are written about in more detail, in Caryl Phillips' book Foreigners, and in Kester Aspden's book The Hounding of David Oluwale. 

We may notice that some of the issues faced by David -- mental ill health, marginalisation, homelessness, displacement, and racism -- are issues faced by many in our city centres today.

The Remember Oluwale charity was formed following a call to memorialize David in Leeds City Centre, by poet Caryl Phillips. "The charity’s aim is to reflect both the city’s woeful neglect and persecution of David, and on the signs of hope contained within his story.. The charity suggests that Leeds has to do more to address multiple issues of marginalisation and exclusion. Anyone, of any background, colour, or class, can and does experience many of David’s tribulations. In a world in which mass migration is promoted by war, environmental degradation and acute economic inequality, and in a city where social problems are increasing as public expenditure falls, ‘David’s issues’ are interlocking and they are multiplying."

For more information on how to enter the contest, please go to the Remember Oluwale Writing Prize page on the Big Bookend website.

Currently reading
Wuthering Heights Emily Bronte
The Shapes of Dogs' Eyes Harry Gallon